Assorted Fire Events: Stories

THE INTERRUPTION

THEY STAYED together on the coldest night of the year, wondering when the security guys might find it in themselves to come out, to send them on their way — and there were ways to be taken even on a winter night, paths that might be taken depending on which guy stumbled first in which direction. Arno had his arm up around the back of Roy’s shoulder as he hunched close to the old man and tried to hear what he was saying — a prattle partly drowned out by the knit cap over his own ears, and partly by a vibration from beneath their frozen boots, coming from the air circulation systems of the Hilton, a low drab noise that was part of the attraction of the spot, like the lowest note on a cathedral organ; Arno listened, half concerned for what Roy was plotting and half concerned for the split in his lip which had opened up and seemed to carry within a chasm of pain too wide for such a small crack in his flesh.

“You go in,” the old guy was sputtering, “and say you have a meeting to attend to and then just slip on past that desk they have there and act like you know where you’re going and find the biggest frickin’ parry going on … then just slink your cold ass back out here to us with what you get … We’ll feast like kings …”

Three bitter cold nights had clamped down on the men, moved them from one locale to another but never into any kind of sustained warmth; a few minutes in the entryway to an apartment building before they were moved on; a few hours in the public library hiding behind opened copies of the Elma Gazette; five minutes inside the vestibule of the First National Bank leaning against the long slab of marble, knees half bent in an effort to ease the shudder of their tired legs, but not sitting down, because to sit would be an admission of needing the full hold of gravity and that, in itself, would draw the attention of the proprietors. All over town it was the proprietors who came and asked them, sometimes kindly and sometimes not, to move on.

“Go on, Arno, give it a shot,” Snag said. Snag was sixteen or seventeen, with the face of a seventy-five-year-old beach bum. He had long hair that was clumped together with scalp oil, real oil, dirt and old vomit — what was left over from the old dreadlock thing he used to have. His eyes, if looked at long enough, solidified into something along the lines of ice cubes; in them one found the stiff coldness that comes from all the drugs, combined with the beatings his old man had given him. His arms were long and thin and brittle with track marks. If asked, he says he doesn’t use drugs. Never has. And there is something about his story — the wide claims he makes — that rings true with the other guys. He hasn’t used drugs. If anything, the needles have shot him up. The crack had to burn someplace, and it picked his pipe. All the monkeys pounding randomly on typewriters ended up writing his story.

“Why don’t you do it? Snag. Go in the fuckin’ hotel.” Arno barely opened his lips over his damaged teeth. Plumes of ice-smoke illustrated his words. He isn’t a big fan of this kid. Having a kid like this around can get you into trouble. Snag wasn’t from Elma. He had an outsider’s skewed vision — from Dearborn, near Detroit.

“We can get past the high school kid,” Snag persisted. “All you have to do is get Roy over there”—he turned, nodded past the bright yellow-copper lights to a another hunk of decorative bush—“and let him start pissing or something so the guy comes out. He comes out to yell at Roy, we go in. Simple as that.”

There was a long communal silence as the men thought over the situation. Zeek began nodding yes to some unspoken question and kept it up for a long time. Zeek was fifty, soft in the head, with a clot of beard around his mouth that gave him the alternative nickname Lint Trap. (He’d die in a few weeks of a bleeding ulcer — half his blood would end up in his stomach cavity, swishing around while his blood pressure dipped. A ten-year-old boy, delivering his Sunday morning papers, would find him frozen to death.)

No one remembers how long it was before Roy, in a sudden burst of what might be called the inspiration of the last ditch, stood up and stretched his arms over his head. His pants were tattered, moth-holed, picked up at Goodwill years ago. “Ah, shit, I’m gonna do it myself,” he said, and before Arno or anyone else could respond, he was off into that semicircle of brightly lit concrete, moving swiftly, parting the electric doors while the valet bent down to adjust his radio, or tie his combat boots — not that it mattered. The men didn’t show the slightest interest in following their friend into that bright abyss. They sat back down, closing the circle, holding their own in a silent huddle, shaking their heads slightly, while Arno remembered how remarkable the bow in the old fart’s legs had been as he stood under the steaming water in the shower at the First Baptist shelter; they were thin legs that bowed under the weight of a long, hard life.

The din in the room hissed with the dull undercurrents of a second marriage; the dark ceiling hung with long strands of crimped silver foil. Below the silver strands were twenty round tables. At one of them Mr. Standard worked on his third scotch, barely able to hold the plastic cup in his large hands. He wanted to crush the cup, to watch it explode. The reception — after about an hour of bad toasts — had become as flat and dull as a bad ball game; nothing was moving, just a shimmer of heat over a blank field. On the dais along with the rest of the wedding party sat Melville, Mel Horton, the groom, with his frank, round face that seemed — at least to Standard — to need breaking in, like a new baseball glove. Someone should pour neat’s-foot oil onto it and mash a fist around, grind it right in — get that rich freshness, that silver-spoon suck, out of those cheeks, he thought. But then he looked over at his wife, at her narrow cheekbones and the fine shape of her wrists. She certainly wouldn’t approve of such a thought one bit. She was best friends with the bride, Susan Porter, who was up there now, shifting around in her wedding gown with that sad complacency Standard had seen a hundred times in other second-timers. He was a firm believer in the downfall of man. His company, Standard Pipe, was going through harder times, having traveled through hard times. It was rusting out, literally: long bleeding smears of rust drew tongues along the patched corrugated steel sides of the main works. Windows were broken and he was barely able to mill his orders anymore. As he sucked his scotch he kept thinking about Melville Horton’s last visit to the office. The bastard stood there in that fine suit of his with his hands dug deep into his pockets. Standard’s office was a little backroom deal, with yellowed blinds and overstuffed filing cabinets and no pretensions of grandeur. On the wall to the left were his old Rotary Club plaques, a few golf trophies blued by dust. One drawer of the file cabinet was open, off the track, and had been that way for ten years. Strangely, this office didn’t in any way really reveal the true nature of Standard, who, by most measures, was fastidious and careful in both his personal matters and his business matters. His cuticles were groomed, his nails perfectly clipped. The office just didn’t matter to him much, not the way the actual metalworks did. And so when Melville Horton sniffed and ran a thumb over his Rotary Man of the Year 1968 plaque, he felt the kind of deep sense of imbalance that just about sent him into a sputtering rage; if there was anything he hated more in the world, it was being snubbed by a kid who wasn’t even a sperm cell when he was wading ashore at Normandy.

“I can’t do this kind of business,” Horton was saying, moving back from the plaque, looking for a chair, finding an old one with a green seat, cross-hatched with gray duct tape. He remained standing. “How am I supposed to get my orders filled when this stuff you’re supposed to do isn’t there in time? I’ve got a machinist rigging a whole new getup, and Bob is working overtime to get the old one running, and then I’m told by Standard that there isn’t pipe coming — so all that work’s for naught.”

Standard looked him up and down before he spoke. Horton was young enough to be his son, the one killed near Khe Sanh, Hill 861, as a member of the 1/9. But unlike his son, who had been rough, a prime all-state quarterback in high school, this kid had a yuppie gloss. His suit was cut a bit too big, hanging over his fat stomach, loose and bagging on the shoulders. “The order’s coming,” Standard mumbled, “I said it would, and it will. We’re just overbooked. I mean Tilco went nuts. Sent us double widths accidently. Then this train strike, I mean to get a box order from Dayton took me a month; and then the fucking thing derailed.”

This kid Melville Horton didn’t understand the old-fashioned unspoken agreement that you didn’t march into a man’s office during a train strike demanding a late job if it wasn’t a matter of real cash. He was an idiot. And Melville wasn’t short on money, not with his shop taking a hundred orders a week. On top of that he was operating the whole thing as a kind of hobby anyhow, because his old man’s old man had founded Cap Soaps before it was incorporated. The bastard cashed in when it went public. He had plenty of liquid assets to move around when needed. The kid didn’t have to worry about derailments or bad tooling. The jerkoff could buy the frickin’ railroad if he felt like it.

The DJ was playing mambo music. There was a muffled announcement, another last-ditch toast to pump life into the reception. Standard put the plastic cup to his lip and sucked the last drops out of the ice.

“Honey.” Ellen Standard put her hand over his. She knew and wanted to ease his thirst. His third was gone and already he was starting to get up. Susan was coming, making the rounds, raising the skirt of her wedding dress as she walked to reveal her thick ankles. She’d gained more weight during the engagement than during the last ten years, since her last marriage.

“I’m getting a refill,” he said, trying to sound casual. There was an edge of panic in his voice, as if the bar might close.

“Congrats, Susan,” he said, barely stopping, just brushing her arm with his and then heading off, swaying slightly, into the dark. There were three people dancing to “Flashdance,” doing a feeble, half-remembered disco step. The music was loud against the hard walls. It boomed from the speakers, black boxes that went halfway to the ceiling. The DJ worked his CD player with amazing seriousness, like a judge presiding over a trial. His face was firm, and he spent time between songs making marks on a clipboard. It was a sad, lonely job, providing music for occasions like this. But on this night, watching Frank Standard sway over to the bar for the fourth time — noting the solemn way the man held his eyes fixed on the bartender — the DJ had a premonition: he felt a shift in the evening, and he would later say that he knew this reception was doomed to some traumatic event. If anyone in the world could feel it coming, he could. He was an expert on the tedium of modern rituals; on the watered-down inability most wedding receptions had of rising above their own careful, deliberate cheerlessness. So when Roy walked through the double doors, smelling of the shit that had dripped down his leg as he swaggered quickly through the hotel lobby, past two guards who were talking heatedly about the Pistons game, the DJ wasn’t surprised: he just lowered the volume dial from ten to seven and sat back.

Two years later, when the divorce papers were signed by both parties, it would be the interruption that people would remember if they thought of the reception at all; the way Roy stood beneath the frame of the doorway, legs apart, arms out from his sides slightly, reeking so much that even the Hilton’s ventilation system, roaring air up through five-foot-wide vents, couldn’t compete; shit and urine and sweat and body odors along with the reek of bourbon on his breath and a hint of garlic from a slice of pizza he’d dug out of a dumpster that afternoon for lunch. It was one of those smells that remain indelible, scratched in the stone of dendrites, a smell that says we’re all from shit, nothing more or less, God forgive us. And it’s this smell that Susan Horton, who after two years had taken on certain refinements of class, thought of as she sat on the deck of the house looking out over the Mediterranean. She was thinner. She’d lost twenty-odd pounds since she arrived at the house, which sat on a cliff, fifty miles from Malaga. Around it, desert stretched; it was Africa, really, licking that edge of Spain, she’d been told by Peter, the Brit who took care of the American houses during the off-season. He picked her up at the airport in Almeria. A squat man with a large forehead. He’d been a British paratrooper, he explained, lifting the cuff of his shirt to show an old tattoo, so faded and blotched it was more like a birthmark. The deck was made of smooth flagstones, with small pebbles between, and felt good on the feet when you returned from the beach. She went down to the water every day, after lunch, stayed for two hours, alone on her straw mat, reading the salty paperbacks someone had left behind, and then, returning alone to the deck, she had a gin and tonic and looked from her spot in the shade out over the landscape. This afternoon, the odor returned to mind. She hadn’t seen Roy when he first staggered into the reception. A description of his entrance came to her via Horton’s sister, Edith, who spoke of it later that evening when the celebration was over, when Roy, beaten black and blue, was sleeping soundly in the county holding cell. The room was cleared of guests, except for the bride and groom, Edith, Ronald, her husband, and Ellen Standard, who was trying to patch up her husband’s reputation. The room was bright, revealing the pipes overhead and the beleaguered black walls marred with kick marks and gouges from high school proms. Under the lights it was impossible to miss the wide oval stain where Roy had deposited his vomit first, before anybody really got to him, before the kicking began. Edith told her that part; she spoke of it as one might of a delicious appetizer. It was truly grotesque. That, that man, he just stood there. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Good god the smell was just perfectly awful. By the fruit and salad bar, bowls set tight in chipped ice; that’s what he moved towards, with Standard and the DJ and a few others the first to notice.

Two weeks after the wedding, the night Roy died with Arno attending to his needs, the first hairline fracture appeared in her marriage — at least in hindsight it looked that way. She sipped the gin and tonic, rattled the ice, felt the cool air from the surface of the drink and thought about it: they’d gone to Wal-Mart on a lark, to buy some Christmas lights, to slum it a bit, parking his Ferrari in the hinterlands to avoid runaway carts, getting out under the sodium lights, finding a strange excitement in the bleak span of pavement. It was snowing quite hard, sticking in clumps to her fur stole. Around the front entryway to the store a few vagabonds lingered. (At the time, the word vagabond fit her vision of these hovering shadows edging around the periphery of things. Her father, a hardworking Hungarian immigrant, looked upon bums as unclean, and he couldn’t help instilling in his only daughter the view that such people were simply wandering out of their own accord, stray hunks of humanity who had lost a toehold on the earth. She had memories of the homeless camp on the edge of Elma one particularly bad year; these were, mostly, men who came down from Canada to pick blueberries, living in an array of makeshift canvas tarps, tents, lean-tos. You could smell it for miles, her father claimed. Dirty people. She was seven years old, and a man came to the house for a cup of water or coffee. In Spain, on the mesa, she had a brief vision of him: his beautiful eyes, marbled brown, in a young face. He was a boy, really. He was her age, a young boy. He had his thumbs tucked into the pockets of his dungarees. She kissed him for no reason. She just felt like it and did it and then there was her father shouting in Hungarian [as he did when he got so angry his circuits shorted out and English was superseded by his native tongue]. He chased the boy a half mile and gave him a lashing with a small shank of pine furring strip. This was after the war, after the Depression and during a strange readjustment when the protocol for approaching such people was being transformed; the country, exploding with riches, no longer had even the smallest room for the dirty, not even a brush with them, she thought, now, on the deck, listening to the gardener moaning slightly to himself.) Inside the store that night there was the stunning, opulent glare of neon racked upon neon, the warmth of aisles stuffed with products — and feeling giddy, they went to the section where the Christmas decorations were. Immediately they began to argue. The argument developed into a fight. The fight was over which kind of lights, white or colored, would look best woven around the front banisters — that’s all she could remember, holding the glass back and letting a piece of ice rest against her front teeth until the cold permeated to the soft center. The sun was behind the mountains, and the dusty, rubble-specked landscape became bathed in the orange afterlife of a day; black swifts dove past the whitewashed houses. Somewhere out of sight the gardener was sloshing water into the flower beds. It was the constriction of their words she could recall; the tone of it; the passing of information in clipped phrases — for what should have been a warm, soft choice — a romantic choice; it was her first indication of the resolute stodginess that went all the way through Horton Melville. She smiles and thinks of the British man, Peter, asking her to go for a drink; she remembers his bulk, unstable on large legs, the way he bounced on the balls of his feet like a kid. Was it love she felt for this man, his ruddy face, cut square, his lingering Cockney accent; his British paratrooper tattoos? She was no longer the kind of woman who would avoid feeling intensely about someone after only a few meetings, she told herself; her experiences with Horton had settled into her view of life, and she was now quite sure that one was best guided by first impulses, by spur-of-the-moment movements, not by some obligation to long-winded common sense.

Arno held on to Roy and guided him along the back of the train station, which stood dark before rails of bleeding rust. One train a day came through to pick up passengers and go on to Detroit, crawling so slowly it didn’t polish the rust away. They were heading towards the old B.+O. control tower, a wobbling tinderbox, half burned along one side by someone’s out-of-control campfire; behind it was an old wax paper factory, every window broken out, gaping at the snow-filled sky. (This was around the time Horton, inside Wal-Mart, held up a set of white lights and said, tightly, “I’d rather maintain tradition.”) And behind them, fifty yards, near the graded road crossing, was a red spot in the snow where Roy had vomited, folded over like an empty wallet while Arno held him around the waist, feeling only the hard bones, nothing left in the way of legs.

“Fucking hold on, Roy,” Arno said.

“We’ll make it, old man,” Roy said.

“Shit’s a foot deep if it’s two.”

“Yep.”

Roy didn’t want to die; and Arno was busting ass to keep him moving. Snow was falling lightly. Everything had a five-inch coat. There was nothing — to Roy’s mind — like the silence of a snowy night, especially in the worst parts of town where, out of their own dilapidation, hulks of the past took on a particular beauty. He loved that. Many winters he’d huddled in the B.+O. tower with his fellows, taking sips, smoking, listening to nothing at all except, perhaps, the keen buzzing isolation of his own loneliness. The tower was a good place to be, and he wanted to be there. It was high up. No matter how often the railroad boarded over the windows, a crew of homeless folks took it upon themselves to shove the plywood sheets away. Under a pile of newsprint, in a corner, you could usually find warmth enough to hold you until daylight. But his busted gut was sending shooting pain across his rib cage. The autopsy would reveal a bruised spleen. His own memory of events had been culled by drink, anyway. If one were to compile all that Roy could fully remember on this snowy night, one might have an oblong collection of images: cold wooden floors; windows with holes stuffed with yellowed paper, the paper mill across the street where his old man used to work; the way men sat on the windowsills in the summer, holding their lunch boxes, eating; the long gaunt features of his mother’s face twisting when she was hit, the vacant recesses of her eyes, beady and black. Nights on the streets removed many memories completely. His life now subsisted on a small kernel at the very center of his mind, and that kernal was the side of his father’s wide palm striking him one morning when he was about eight, breaking his jaw so that it hung as limp as laundry from the line … and that was enough to fuel him on this snowy night.

The gardener was extremely thin, his dark blue work pants limp from his legs, and the hose quivered in his hand. Her gin and tonic was finished, and she was sitting, watching the light fade away from the rubble, the sea glistening, listening to voices rising up from the beach below. She wasn’t sure of his name — Miguel was her guess. He was hired by Peter, and Peter did most of the talking to him.

“Hola,” she said.

He grunted, lifted the hose a bit too high, splashed water on his toes. He lay the hose at the base of a bush and took a bandanna from his pocket to wipe his shoes. They were the kind of shoes she saw for sale at the market: truck-tire treads, cheap, thin, suede leather. She’d gone to the market that morning, accompanied by Peter, who said it was part of his job to drive visitors — ones who didn’t have rented cars — to Carbonaras. The intense dryness of the country along with the unexpected relentlessness of the morning heat seemed to kick her olfactory nerves into high gear. Suddenly everything had a precise smell: The dust. Sand. The rocks around the houses. The buckets of cheap, plastic housewares. Rows of detergent bottles. Long tables of leather goods; and of course the fish and bread. On the deck, watching Miguel slosh water around the other bushes (if she had looked carefully she would have seen how he plied the hose with great respect, sloshing but only in a certain jittery way. The scarcity of water was a part of his bones, his dry, brittle skin; from the wells it came saline and rank), she touched the side of her arm near her elbow where Peter, in the crush of the crowd, had held her, guided her like a blind woman.

From the B.+O. tower switch room there was a view of the cantilevered arches holding up the snow-covered roof of the unused train station. Along one wall of the building stood an old luggage cart with metal wheels, the only thing that hadn’t been destroyed, vandalized, painted over with tags, defiled by piss or shit or broken glass because it was too large — and the wheels were frozen in place with rust — to shove off the platform. In the tower a long tongue of snow had drifted in through the missing window and forced them back against the rear wall, where they sat, legs up, huddled against each other. Roy’s breathing was labored and deep. His face was rough with unshaven hair. He seemed to work his mouth around each breath. Arno lit a Camel, took a draw, held it to his friend’s mouth.

“Come on, you old fuck. Hang on.”

(Hang on. To what? For what? Arno had not the slightest idea how or what the old fuck was supposed to hang on to. For his death was so much writing on the wall, a certitude against which no bets would be placed. His statement here was perhaps just a lulling platitude spoken out of a sense of duty to those conditions of death. In that case it might be said that Arno had risen to the highest condition of humanity in that he was playing out his role upon the stage, the penultimate stage, of the end of his friend’s life. On the other hand, maybe Arno meant it; maybe he simply wanted Roy to hang on to life, nothing more, or less. Perhaps his idea of dragging Roy to the B.+O. tower was to find at least a small bit of domesticity; four walls, perhaps a blanket of old Elma Gazettes, maybe a jackpot bottle of port; better yet, maybe they’d get arrested and find contentment in jail.)

At least they’d made a night of it, dragging themselves all the way down Main in the snow before stumbling upon Zeek, who was up against the inside corner of a white-scratched Plexiglas bus shelter smoking a tiny, reed-thin, crack-laced joint, jittery with cold and stretched nerves. Inside the shelter, headlights bled like long sizzling lines of melting ice across the milky Plexiglas. The men had a powwow, snorting the cold air, gulping from the neck of a bottle of Boone’s Farm cherry wine Zeek had stolen from another wino at knifepoint. When that was gone, Zeek materialized — actually saying the word abracadabra — from behind Roy’s head a bottle of Thunderbird, and, opening it, put it to Roy’s lips and let him tilt his head back for as long as he wanted. He fed Roy the wine the way you’d feed a baby. Burping the old fuck; making sure he wasn’t getting too much air. And even though he was stoned numb, he still got the faint pleasure of seeing the old guy’s blood nourished.

Perhaps it is the nature of some weddings to have as their undercurrent the possibility of great violence and tragedy; perhaps that alone is what we hear buzzing beneath the music, the silent movement of balloons and tossed confetti over the hiss of starched gowns, the embrace of tight collars and cummerbunds. The DJ knew this. He understood it well.

Coming back from the bar with another Scotch, Standard considered the stale business atmosphere of Elma, the depleted economic resources of that part of the state, and a recent study indicating a severe shortage of piping material and rising prices because of Islamic wars in regions of the globe he was hard-pressed to locate on a map. He felt ready for some shift in the world. The music was easing. There was a sudden lull. A chunk of the general chatter was gone, and many people — standing and sitting — seemed to shift course, like a flock of geese changing direction in midflight. Just before he turned to see Roy staggering in the doorway, he recalled Melville going down the rickety stairs of his office, shoulders straight, braced by the pin-striped suit. The Standard Piping sign, wind-blistered, in need of repair, hung limp in the background. He’d given a halfhearted lift of his fist to the kid, wanting to yell something out but knowing that things have changed and that the Melvilles of the world have prevailed. It isn’t any use. He went back into the office and sat down on his duct-taped chair and thought about it — not exactly seething, but nursing the tight anger that he kept inside him all the way through the summer and into the winter, feeling it as he stepped from his Lincoln Towncar into the cold, across the lobby of the hotel and into his fourth (or was it fifth?) Scotch. So when he turned and saw Roy, the deep wrinkles dwelling on the homeless man’s face, the old navy watch cap politely in his hand, he felt a sharp pleasure at knowing there was going to be a general ruckus. The stench, the shit smell, was already drifting around.

There is a stillness that only the destitute know. And Arno felt it keenly, helping Roy get comfortable, tucking the folds of his old army coat around the man’s skull. He went out to the stairs to smoke — not out of respect or politeness but as an excuse to get out. It had been four months since summer, when nights were easy and they went to the woods outside of town and sat around the scrapwood campfire near Roy’s wigwam, enjoying the fruits of a day scavenging dumpsters. The smoke from his Camel conjoined with that of his breath as he blew it out. It was well below zero. The cloud of smoke and breath seemed to stand still. Fuck, he said softly, fuck fuck fuck, flicking the butt out into the darkness.

Around the moment when Roy died, Susan Porter-Horton was brushing her teeth, still adjusting herself to the height of the sink in their new house. The gooseneck faucet plated in real gold got in her way when she washed her face. She made a note to herself that she would have the faucets replaced as soon as things settled in; she’d wait until the pretenses of those first few weeks of being married were over and she was secure enough to make suggestions of that sort. The long, rambling split-level with postmodern flourishes had been built for Melville’s first wife. It was full of ghosts from the past. Vows weren’t simply washed away even by legal procedures, divorce lawyers or hate. She rinsed her toothbrush and slipped it back into the gold-plate holder, and stared at her face, flabby cheeks, pale, bloodless lips and eyes she didn’t trust anymore.

(In Spain, after making love to Peter, she lies in bed listening to the wind, arriving hot from the coast of Africa, draw through the windows; she then for a moment, a fleeting moment, goes over a long list of changes she made in the house — she thinks of the faucets, their elegant arches, the fine bone handles, and wonders if she’d have them back now. She gets up, silently, moves across the cool floor. On the bed the large bulk of the ex-Marine heaves and sighs, floating amid his own dreams.)

Every gesture becomes grand around death. Arno went back inside and saw that Roy was shivering violently. At a loss for what to do, he did what came naturally and, parting his shirt, lay atop the old guy, holding his weight on his knees and his elbows so he wouldn’t crush his ribs; he held this position for as long as he could until he slid down and their stubbled cheeks touched. (They’d shaved a week ago at the Baptist mission, side by side, Arno helping out, drawing the Good News razor along the sunken cheeks of his friend — swishing it in the hot water. There had been a sense then in the air of the impending death when, in the shower, Roy’s knees weakened and he slid down to the tiles under the steam. There was none of the slaphappy towel play that had — a year ago — accompanied the early stages of the love between the men, just after they swore over that bottle together. Arno showered alone, while Roy, dried off and dressed, talked to Grant, the pastor. He showered alone so he could masturbate, sliding the bulk of a bar of Irish Spring up and down the sides of his cock — no shame whatsoever coming from the sweet act. The love of his hands for his cock were as pure as any form of love available. It was clean, Godly love in the land of the lonely. It took five minutes. The water was warm to hot depending on the use of water in the soup kitchen where the volunteer ladies were rinsing the glasses as they came in. He was thinking soft, lovely thoughts. He was thinking about a girl he knew when he was in tenth grade named Wendy.) Ten minutes later he left Roy’s body to freeze.

The men outside the Hilton waiting for Roy to come out that night did so the way anybody would wait for a savior. They sat dreamily considering what was about to transpire: he’d come out brashly with a shit-eating grin and his arms loaded with booty, snaking past the high school kid in the uniform, swagging his hips in a drunkard’s dance of victory while they hooted and hollered. It was their way. They knew how to celebrate the small victories. The men with the arduous determination of stoics. Now and then, after a while, one of them muttered: “I wonder what happened to the old fuck.” And another said: “Oh give the old shit a chance, he’ll be out. I’m sure he will. For Jesus fuck’s sake. Give the guy a chance.”¹ But there was no such Second Coming, of course, and all that kept coming that night and the next was the snow. It fell in great clumps. It fell in a fine powder. It fell in an edgy sleet.